Game Teaching Children How to Handle Internet Predators
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I found this via Fark the other morning and realized two things; 1) This is good for kids because finally there is a way for them to learn how to deal with what many parents have no knowledge about and 2) It’s sad that such a product has to exist.
ABC News: Abduction Game Isn’t Child’s Play
When Nancy Teasley heard the rumors that two of the girls in her sixth-grade computer technology class at Weatherford, Okla., Middle School, had been propositioned online, she was glad for a game that she’d had her students play.
The computer game is called “Missing.” Developed by a Vancouver, British Columbia, company, it is now distributed free in the United States to schools and police departments by Web Wise Kids, a nonprofit organization based in Santa Ana, Calif.
[...]
[Teasley] said the game provides an up-to-date answer to the age-old problem of how to keep children safe from the cunning people who want to harm them.
“Twenty years ago we talked to our kids about how to protect themselves if they were out playing or in the park,” she said. “But with the Internet, it’s a different thing, and kids have to learn the dangers are out there.”
[...]
According to a Department of Justice report, one in five children under 18 who use the Internet has been propositioned online, and according to Nielson NetRatings there are some 20 million children ages 12 to 17 who surf the Web.
When the Girl Scout Research Institute polled girls about their Internet use, 30 percent said they had been sexually harassed online, but only 7 percent said they told their parents.
According to Pew Internet, nearly 60 percent of teenagers say they have received an e-mail or instant message from a stranger, and half of all teen Internet users say they have sent messages to people they never met.
[...]
Monique Nelson, a spokeswoman for Web Wise Kids, said the game helps to overcome some of the illusions that the Internet allows predators to perpetrate, illusions that were harder to even create when they needed to approach their potential victims in person.
“Kids need to be scared,” Nelson said. “They take the Internet, chat rooms and e-mail too lightly. The ’stranger-danger’ thing doesn’t work with the Internet. As soon as a kid makes a friend in a chat room, that person is no longer a stranger to them.” …
This will be a growing problem until there is some form of legislation put into place or at least until judges get very smart and start banning pedophiles from using the Internet.
As generation after generation grows up with the Internet it will breed new victims and new predators. Hopefully products such as “Missing” can save a few childhoods and some lives.
Originally featured on 
